dirkf

I've been using SpamCop for years (decades?) but lately I've been wondering if they're still relevant.

One example: they seem to have a size limit of 50KB when you report a spam mail via their web form. I've received quite some spam that exceeds that because they use base64 encoding of the body, add non-visible filler content to drown out the actual spam/phishing message, etc.

SpamCop suggests to cut off the message and still process it but then they miss e.g. the link to the phishing website and thus they can't send out a report for that.

Speaking of phishing links: a lot of the phishing mails I receive, link to some account on storage.googleapis.com. I've seen mails with links to the same account for weeks on end before they switch to a different one, implying that these links remain online for a long time. You would think that marking such mails as phishing in GMail (they are already flagged as spam) would get them on some kind of radar but apparently not...

20? Try 5...

I"m working on a repository that uses at least four different jira ticket number formats. All commits should have a jira reference but I think only the current format can still be looked up. And maybe the predecessor if you know what jira field to query. All the rest are lost in corporate limbo. Not that those tickets added much more context to the actual commit...

So yeah, always write your commit messages as standalone as possible.

There's one DDD feature that I haven't found elsewhere: its graphical representation of a struct and its contents. You can double-click on a pointer field and then it draws whatever that field pointed to, with a nice arrow connecting the two.

I've found it a very powerful yet compact way to visualize the state of a program when debugging.

(Fellow country man here!) That still sounds like a lot to be honest. According to the yearly stats we receive from our trash collector: in 2021 our family of 4 produced 27,50kg of non-recyclables. That's not per month or per person but for all of us for the whole year. Granted, no diapers anymore here; that takes quite some space (and weight, which is more important since we pay per kg).

We saw a significant drop after they started collecting plastics separately. We have a 120 litre bin that we put to the curb every two months or so. I don't quite understand what people are throwing out all the time that you can fill a large bin every week...

On a related note: I have the impression Broadcom is more and more losing terrain to the likes of Qualcomm and Mediatek. A couple of years ago nearly everybody was using Broadcom chips in their products (or at least in the consumer-grade telecom devices I'm familiar with as part of my job). Now I'm seeing a shift away from them.

I can't really say if it's due to better features, price, vendor support, open source support, documentation, or perhaps all of the above. In any case, some competition is certainly welcome.

So something like https://syncthing.net/ ?

Note that they no longer do this fallback to local name resolving:

From the advisory:

  Starting in curl 8.4.0, curl no longer switches to local resolve mode if the name is too long but is instead rightfully returning an error.

In my country it has been mandatory for at least a decade in any new construction or significant renovation to collect rain water and use it for at least flushing toilets.

It's not that expensive to install at that time and saves a lot of potable water. Seems like a no-brainer to me to do this everywhere.

Average house where? Here in my European country the average is more like 10kWh per day.

Are you referring to the original DAB (using MP2) or the upgraded DAB+ standard (using HE-AACv2)? I think most, if not all, stations have switched to DAB+. I'm told the quality is better than FM and based on my experience it's certainly not worse as far as I can hear. Of course, since FM is analog it degrades linearly whereas DAB+ is digital: it either works or it doesn't. This might skew the perception of quality.

It's a balanced mechanical ventilation system with a heat exchanger and located in the attic. It pulls in fresh air via an inlet on the roof and then distributes it via a set of tubes to the various rooms. Similarly, it extracts stale air via other tubes from other rooms to the outside through an outlet elsewhere on the roof.

Both airflows pass the heat exchanger so the outgoing air can heat up the incoming air to minimize heat losses. These airflows are balanced, i.e. the various inlets/outlets in the rooms are calibrated so the total inflow matches the total outflow without the fans in the device having to run at different speeds.

An alternative system that is frequently used here is mechanical extraction while fresh air is pulled in 'naturally' via slits at the top of the window frames. This is obviously cheaper but has some disadvantages:

- The incoming air is cold and thus your heating system needs to work harder to keep the temperature constant. - You can feel this cold air flowing in, typically around your feet and this can be uncomfortable. - Less control over how much air flows in: a bit of wind outside can mean more (cold) air is blown into your house. There are sliders on these slits but they are manual so people either keep them open (resulting in more incoming air than strictly needed) or they close them (resulting in too little ventilation).

Passive houses typically use balanced mechanical ventilation coupled with a heat exchanger so outgoing stale air will heat up incoming fresh air to minimize heat losses.

Performance wise floor heating has no problem with keeping a well insulated house warm; it doesn't have to be a passive house for that.

Comfort wise I think floor heating is the best. It's radiated heat instead of heat from hot air circulating around, and since it's coming from below it tends to give you a more evenly feeling of warmth across the whole room/house.

Comparing cost is difficult... you have to look at the complete picture of all equipment you need in the house: how do you produce the heat? Is the same appliance also used for heating your tap water? How do you ventilate your house? Do you want/need some way to cool the house during summer?

We've chosen a geothermal heatpump that handles both heating the house and the tap water. Since we don't need much heating capacity the additional cost compared to the commonly used (at that time) gas heater was manageable. Additional benefits:

- Gas/oil heaters require a mandatory (bi-)yearly maintenance/checkup while a heatpump doesn't. - Using only electricity as energy source means I only have to pay one set of installation cost + yearly fixed subscription cost. - Electricity I can generate locally on my roof. - The heatpump can also be used for cooling via the floor heating system. It's not the same as real A/C but on the other hand it costs way less energy (basically just running the circulation pumps).

I live in a passive house in western Europe; AMA :)

So far autumn has been fairly mild and quite sunny. As far as I know our (floor) heating has not had to kick in, or if it did it has been limited. I was still walking around in T-shirt + shorts until well into October. So yeah, I can confirm passive houses work, and I'm glad they do with the current energy prices.

When we built our house such passive houses were rare. Nowadays basically every newly built house should be (more or less) passive due to regulations that were tightened every couple of years. But there are still many many old and very energy inefficient houses that are in need of a good renovation...

Wladimir Palant (original creator Adblock Plus and nowadays doing security work with a focus on browser extensions) has recently started a blog series on browser extension security: https://palant.info/2022/08/10/anatomy-of-a-basic-extension/

(ITYM $1/Wh, not kWh)

For reference, I'm currently waiting for delivery of a 10kWh battery that will cost me about €6100 (including VAT, excluding installation and government subsidy).

Indeed; here it's mandated by law to have a bell on your bike (together with lights and reflectors back and front). I would expect that's the case in many European countries.

There are cheap bells that you mount on the handlebar but they tend to break easily (and don't produce much sound; typically just one ting). Decent bikes have a more sturdy design, see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_bicycle#/media/File:Du... (it's on the left, wrapped around the handlebar next to your hand). These tend to produce more sound.

Firefox Focus on Android basically does that by default.

If you set it as default browser then all links you click will be openend there. Hit the back button when you're done and everything is deleted.

Another use case is if you quickly want to open some website to look something up: open the website, maybe click a few links, and when you're done everything is wiped.

You can keep a regular Firefox (or Chrome or whatever) for surfing to those websites where you want to keep some state.

In my European country if a train was running very late they could turn around the train some stops earlier, thereby not servicing the stations further down the track. Since the train would never arrive there it implied it also couldn't be late and thus it would not be counted in the statistics as such.

The rail company has a government-imposed punctuality target and their result is used in the calculation of how much money they get from the government the next year, i.e. the usual "once a KPI becomes a target..."

Just FYI: Lua also allows you to provide your own allocator function.

In fact, the core API function to create a new Lua state (lua_newstate()) requires an allocator function but usually people use a library API function (luaL_newstate()) for state creation that calls the core API using an allocator based on the standard C functions.

They're against it; see for example https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3906

For me it's often the other way around... system language is English but where possible (e.g. browser) I indicate Dutch/Flemish can also be used. Still, many websites seem to think that they should default to their French version despite my settings and even geo IP putting me in the non-French part...

I wish they would stop guessing and just listen to the hints...

In the C world I sometimes do something similar: the C file with the test code simply #include's the actual source file and gets compiled into one executable (together with some mocks).

Not too dirty (ahem...) and allows you to test various internal parts. And I must admit I got the idea after looking into Rust :)

Meanwhile in Belgium: https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2021/12/08/couriers-fail-to-win...

Note how it says: "match the performance of the LuaJIT interpreter" (emphasis mine). LuaJIT basically has two parts: an interpreter in handcrafted assembly which is quite a bit faster than the standard Lua VM, and the actual JIT, which is even faster. IIRC on iOS the JIT is not allowed but the interpreter is still there.

There's now a treatment using low-concentration atropine eye drops to more-or-less stop the further deteriorating of the eyes (at least for near-sightedness).

Our ophthalmologist told us about this when we took our oldest there after noticing she had some issues in seeing things properly from a distance. Since my wife and myself have on average -8 we were keeping an eye out (ha!) on our kids for any signs of vision issues.

Basically every night before bed you put a drop in each eye and keep this up for as long as they're still growing. If you can start early enough this means they can end up with e.g. -1.5 or -2 instead of regressing all the way to e.g. -8.5 like me. Definitely a quality-of-life improvement, less chance of other eye issues later on, reduced cost of glasses and easier treatment with a laser to get back to 0 in case they want that.

It's fairly new, at least here in Europe, so not all doctors are familiar with it. Same for pharmacists: they need to prepare these eye drops themselves since they are not available directly from a manufacturer in this low concentration.

Also see the stark contrast with their Facebook Lite app. Makes you wonder what difference all those megabytes in the full app actually make...

We even have McAfee on our Linux machines... And yes, doing a build is impacted by this...

A few examples of such deaths:

- An older man was found dead in his flooded basement. Presumably he went to check the status but exact circumstances and cause of death are not clear yet. - Another older man tried to remove some branches from a clogged drain pipe. When he succeeded he got dragged along with the sudden surge of draining water and has not been found since.

- A twenty-something guy got the idea to go 'play around in the water with some kind of floaty toy'. He got dragged away.

- A fire brigade rescue boat got into trouble during a mission. The three elder people they had rescued went overboard and have been missing since. Two of the five firemen on the boat also went overboard but managed to secure themselves until they were rescued.

It's a tragedy. Flooding of this scale has not been seen here. People don't know the dangers. And culturally a house is quite important for most people (the saying is that we "are born with a brick in our stomach") so they often refuse to leave their house.

The last decade or so there have been improvements to give rivers more space, open up streams again that got covered up, make available basins that can be flooded to buffer water, increase/strengthen dikes and embankments, ... But what we've seen now was of a different order of magnitude: we've had locations that got like 100L+ of water in 24h whereas they would normally receive 800L in a whole year.

Can concur here in Western Europe. For more than a decade we've had a regulation where you have to run your plans for a new building through a tool that calculates a score reflecting the projected energy consumption in a broad sense. The maximum allowed score has been adjusted down every few years.

The effect is indeed that all new buildings (and renovations that involve some kind of constructing new volumes) have improved massively in energy consumption. Still, we have such a massive amount of old buildings with next to none insulation that get renovated so slowly that it will take a long time to actually make a decent dent in reducing our climate footprint.

But there's definitely a good focus on improving our buildings. Main issue with these new buildings is no longer having decent insulation to keep heating costs down but making sure they don't overheat when there's good weather, and ventilating them properly. This is also part of the score calculation but in my experience not sufficiently highlighted.